Indiana Attorney General Greg Zoeller started his Thursday morning with what seemed, on the surface, like good news.
A two-day conference he’d organized had attracted more than 900 people. And part of the news he was announcing that day was a $400,000 grant from his office to law enforcement.
But the overflow crowd that had gathered at the Indiana Convention Center were there for a grim reason: Tied by profession or interest in some way to the problem of drug addiction, they knew the opiate epidemic gripping Indiana appears to be getting worse, not better, as evidenced by increasing reports of heroin and prescription painkiller overdoses this past year.
In Indianapolis alone, police and rescue workers are on a record pace to revive more than 1,500 overdosed addicts this year.
That number only hints at the reality of addiction’s harmful reach: A study of four Indianapolis area hospitals this year found 1 in 5 newborns were born with opiates — from heroin or prescription painkillers — in their bloodstreams and had to be treated for drug withdrawal.
“I don’t have much reason to feel optimistic,” said Zoeller, who’s been an ardent advocate of more resources for addiction prevention and treatment since soon after taking office.
On that discouraging note, Zoeller kicked off the 7th annual Indiana Prescription Drug Abuse Symposium, which he’s hosted every year since its founding.
This year’s symposium theme, “Rebuilding the Hoosier Heartland” hinted at what he hopes to come as communities around Indiana struggle to combat the problem in a state that, until recently, has allocated very few dollars to addiction services.
And the keynote speaker, journalist Sam Quinones, offered a glimpse of how to get there.
Quinones is author of the 2015 book, “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.”
In heartbreaking and compelling detail, it chronicles how the prescription-opiate epidemic intersected with the surge of the heroin opiate from Mexico — and the savvy marketing plan of Mexican dealers to Americans hungry for any version of an opiate to kill their pain.
It’s also a story of the kind of pill mills that once flourished in Indiana and, especially in rural areas, where doctors prescribed opiate-based painkillers in bulk. By the time Quinones wrote his book, more than 8,000 people were dying each year from heroin overdose. Roughly double that number were dying from prescription opioid painkillers.
But as Quinones told his Indianapolis audience, his book is also a story of what came before the scourge: the decades spent destroying community in a range of ways, from the hot pursuit of profits by corporations to the panicked fear of parents desperate to isolate their children and themselves from any experience of pain.
When Quinones said “we’ve built into our suburbs an isolation that we called prosperity,” he likely unnerved some in the audience.
Where Quinones has found hope is in the communities wracked by addiction — like the Indiana town of Austin, the epicenter of an HIV epidemic last year among needle-sharing opiate addicts — that have united to fight back and demanded the resources to do so.
Their common theme, he said, is the rebuilding of relationships as community members realized everyone had a stake in the fight, from police and prosecutors to parents and preachers and all in between.
“The antidote is not naloxone,” Quinones said. “It’s community.”
He got a standing ovation for that.